Nostalgia Blackmail
Image courtesy of Old School Paul
One of the defining features of this recession is the number of brands immersing themselves in utterly self-indulgent nostalgia trips in a desperate attempt to curry favour with increasingly cynical consumers.
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Reasons to be cheeerful 1 2 3
Image courtesy of Max Ferguson
Gripped as we are by the bloody teeth of recession and now with conclusive proof from ICM that Britain, of all leading nations is the most miserable and pessimistic about its economic future, it is perhaps peculiar that the most potent buzz word in advertising is optimism. We see it in our consumer’s actions if not attitudes, we see in in contemporary culture and increasingly we see it in the work from the T-mobile Dance event to Coke’s Happiness campaign.
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That tricky second album
Life's for sharing. Image courtesy of maize
So here it is 48 hours after we wrapped the shoot, the second T-Mobile Campaign 'Sing-a-long'.
It took us a month, 13,500 people, 200 extras, 2,000 microphones, 8 songs, Vernon Kay and Pink to pull off. But we are rather happy with the results as so it appeared were the people in Trafalgar Square last thursday.
See what you think.
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Context is king
Out of context is viewing online commercially valuable? Image courtesy of papa'rocket.
As we career head long into the economic car crash that is destroying jobs, crushing consumer expenditure and ripping the confidence and profitability out of both client and agency organisations, one performance metric has emerged above all others to guide us through these tricky times.
It’s not a measure of efficiency like cost per response, it’s not a measure of likelihood to purchase like brand consideration and its certainly nowhere close to a measure of return on investment. It is the number of people viewing a commercial online.
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Love it before it leaves you
Keighley Station on the Keighley And Worth Valley Railway, location for our latest Head and Shoulders ad. Image courtesy of Matt Ots
I know how much you all love it when I post new Saatchi & Saatchi work. But I kinda think that an advertising blog with no advertising is a bit silly and moreover if I am going to bang on about stuff online I should put up the work we are doing to be transparent and accountable.
So here is the latest work for Head & Shoulders.
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r-e-s-p-e-c-t
Image courtesy of badjonni
I have a very cruel, but accurate, joke about why planners have adopted social media with more enthusiasm than others in the advertising business. In advertising only planners blog, account handlers have nothing to say and creatives have better places to say it.
Continue reading "r-e-s-p-e-c-t" That'll be the latest outing for the 'Life Flows Better' campaign for Visa. It features the performance of Bill Shannon and was directed by Joey Garfield both of whom we came across last year while putting together the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors showcase.
Continue reading "More work thats not bad"More work thats not bad
Overcoming our empathy deficit
For those that know me personally, the idea that I have been thinking a bit about empathy may come as a bit of an out of character departure.
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What's in a name?
It is not clear why, of all the things that might concern a business as we enter a year of economic and consumer uncertainty, changing your brand name would be number one on the list of priorities.
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Bursting with pride
The full T-mobile ad shot on Thursday morning and aired last night.Allowing myself a small off topic moment of bigging up Saatchis. I think the phrase 'we're back' may be in order. More at the T-Mobile YouTube channel.
New year's revelations
Image courtesy of Henry Hingst.
It struck me recently that, although I place great store in the quality of an insight, I really had no consistent way of measuring how good one of them was and no way to help other people recognise a potent insight if they stumbled across one. That has all changed.
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Calling time on digital's cult of accountability
Image courtesy of Aussiegall
Occasionally I have the enormous pleasure of judging New Media Age’s Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards. And a very splendid awards scheme it is too, with this year’s kings of the digital castle crowned in some style last month. I get invited to fill the ‘enthusiasm-over-experience’ role of digital-curious advertising outsider. This usually involves gobbing off in a cavalier fashion and then being slapped down by people that actually know what they are talking about.
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Great ideas can come from anywhere, my arse
Image courtesy of Markus Nielsen
There are many terrible cliches that lurk like sewer rats in the daily effluent of the advertising industry. And much like sewer rats they are always close to the surface, wholly unpleasant and bloody difficult to eradicate.
By far the most pernicious and destructive is the now widely held belief that ‘ideas can come from anywhere’. What this annoying little platitude means is that anyone engaged in a project whether client or agency and regardless of their discipline may be the person that cracks the big idea.
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Welcome back America - we missed you
The power of emotion
Image courtesy of awwwww.cc
A couple of weeks ago I gave a little talk on the power of emotion in advertising. I thought I'd share a little of it because there are some nice examples.
I have also included a handy little PDF on emotions from Robert Plutchick that adds more depth than in the presentation I gave. In particular it shows our evolutionary response to those emotional stimuli. For example in the case of being presented with an unpalatable object (say a cigarette full of gunk and not tobacco) we appraise that as poison which stimulates digust. Our reaction to disgust is to vomit and eject the poison. And that model helps us to understand why disgust is sucha powerful emotion in advertising if you want people to change behaviour (like give up smoking) and not just change their attitudes.
